Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete eBook

I have written eight or nine hundred
manuscript pages in such a brief space of time
that I mustn’t name the number of days; I shouldn’t
believe it myself, and of course couldn’t expect
you to. I used to restrict myself to four
and five hours a day and five days in the week,
but this time I have wrought from breakfast till 5.15
P.M. six days in the week, and once or twice I
smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn’t looking.
Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on
Sunday, on the sly.

He refers to the game, though rather indifferently.

When I wrote you I thought I had it;
whereas I was merely entering upon the initiatory
difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn’t
be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent
historical game long ago—­a thing which
nobody has done.

Notwithstanding the fact that he was working at Huck
with enthusiasm, he seems to have been in no hurry
to revise it for publication, either as a serial or
as a book. But the fact that he persevered until
Huck Finn at last found complete utterance was of
itself a sufficient matter for congratulation.

CXLV

HOWELLS AND CLEMENS WRITE A PLAY

Before Howells went abroad Clemens had written:

Now I think that the play for you to
write would be one entitled, “Colonel Mulberry
Sellers in Age” (75), with Lafayette Hawkins
(at 50) still sticking to him and believing in
him and calling him “My lord.”
He [Sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various
ways. Your refined people and purity of speech
would make the best possible background, and when
you are done, I could take your manuscript and
rewrite the Colonel’s speeches, and make him
properly extravagant, and I would let the play
go to Raymond, and bind him up with a contract
that would give him the bellyache every time he read
it. Shall we think this over, or drop it as
being nonsense?

Howells, returned and settled in Boston once more,
had revived an interest in the play idea. He
corresponded with Clemens concerning it and agreed
that the American Claimant, Leathers, should furnish
the initial impulse of the drama.

They decided to revive Colonel Sellers and make him
the heir; Colonel Sellers in old age, more wildly
extravagant than ever, with new schemes, new patents,
new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind.

Howells came down to Hartford from Boston full of
enthusiasm. He found Clemens with some ideas
of the plan jotted down: certain effects and
situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was
no general scheme of action. Howells, telling
of it, says:

I felt authorized to make
him observe that his scheme was as nearly
nothing as chaos could be.
He agreed hilariously with me, and was
willing to let it stand in
proof of his entire dramatic inability.